Closely allied is the good old homely virtue of honesty. Under the temptation of loss of property, men have sought to accumulate by any methods and get back to ante-secession pecuniary condition. Public corruption has been contagious. Men contract debts loosely and improvidently, and wipe out easily by bankrupt laws. Tweedism has fastened itself upon elections. False registration, ballot-box stuffing, the machinery and appliances for fraud, are not the exclusive practice of one section or party. "Cheating never thrives." It is as true in politics as in religion that there is no good in sin. It is essentially and always evil. Party is a great tyrant at best, and the caucus system enslaves men, and few have the courage to disobey its edicts and encounter its vengeance; but when party to the terrible enginery of a caucus, controlled by the vulgar and the vicious, adds fraud and bribery, woe be to our republic and to our civilization!
An indispensable factor to the product of the South's upbuilding is the introduction of a more healthful public opinion as a positive element in politics. It ought to be an ever-present and a permanent force in elections and the choice of candidates. Any thing like union of church and State, or the prescribing of a Christian profession as a test for office, is not to be thought of, except to resist the first hint at such a possibility; but such opposition should not prevent moral and Christian men from demanding honesty in officials, fairness and openness in party machinery, and common decency and morality in candidates. In cities, political preferment and success in nominating caucuses are largely the result of party machinery by "pot-house politicians," by grog shops and gambling saloons, and by men not conspicuous for virtue or intelligence. So foul is the atmosphere of party politics, to such dishonoring and degrading practices are applicants for office often reduced, so necessary is it to spend money corruptly and to pension the claqueurs and intriguers and wire-pullers, that the virtuous and patriotic are often disgusted, and many Christians are unwilling to peril spiritual health and life by contact with such impurities. The complications and "trimming" expediences often deter the pure and refined from political associations, and those who control American politics are quite content to dispense with the presence, except at the ballot-box, of those who ought to give tone and direction to public opinion. Moral character, sobriety, decency, chastity, are not the elements of availability in the selection of candidates. Drunkards, profligates, connivers at fraud, plotters, are apparently as acceptable for nomination and election as those whose intelligence and virtues should commend them to public approval. Macaulay has a sentiment which ought to be printed on satin and hung up in every house to be memorized by every voter: "The practice of begging for votes is absurd, pernicious, and altogether at variance with the true principles of representative government. The suffrage of an elector ought not to be asked, or to be given, as a personal favor. It is as much for the interests of constituents to choose well as it can be for the interest of a candidate to be chosen.... A man who surrenders his vote to caresses and supplications forgets his duty as much as if he sold it for a bank-note. I hope to see the day when an Englishman (an American) will think it as great an affront to be courted and fawned upon in his capacity of elector as in his capacity of juryman."
Not lightly fall
Beyond recall
The written scrolls a breath can float:
The crowning fact,
The kingliest act
Of freedom is the freeman's vote.
The too common practice in all portions of the Union honors vice and gives scant encouragement to noblest qualities. If a community bestow its rewards and honors on inferior or vicious men, higher qualities will decay and perish or seek other fields. If honors and rewards be allotted to the noble and the good, the demand will develop intelligence and nobility. In America there is lamentably a plentiful lack of great men. Whatever may be the demand, the supply is inadequate. Woe to the country, said Metternich, whose condition and institutions no longer produce great men to manage its affairs. The country needs men of earnest convictions and noble aims, "to whom power is not a possession to be grasped, but a trust to be fulfilled." A nation can have no purer wealth than the stainless honor of its public men. The philosophic Macintosh enunciated almost a maxim when he said, "There can be no scheme or measure as beneficial to the State as the mere existence of men who would not do a base act for any public advantage." By some, politics seems to be regarded as a game in which the sharpest are to win. Federal, State, or municipal government can never be safely committed to any party or men as the result of fraud or connivance at fraud.
Since the Federal Government dispensed with a period of probation as preparatory to suffrage, and refused to leave the whole question of suffrage to the States where it properly belongs, the presence of the negroes becomes to the South fearfully ominous of peril. Giving the right to vote to the ignorant and incapable is only a part of the evils associated with the inhabitancy of such a multitude of citizens of a different and inferior race. Such is the climate of the South, the fertility of soil, the ease of bare subsistence, that little labor and but scant clothing and shelter are needed by the negroes, with their thriftlessness, and without taste or desire for any large measure of artificial comforts, and with few incentives to patient industry. Their presence will prevent any early or large immigration of Europeans. The removal of the negroes is an obvious suggestion, but the policy pursued toward the Indians, undesirable, as coinhabitants, but as capable as negroes of free government, seems impracticable from want of territory for colonization and because of the large number of the negroes. This displacement at present may be impossible, and would certainly be tedious and expensive. Close contact of the two races becomes a necessity of this coöccupancy of territory. The Southern white people should cultivate kindliest feelings and make wise and strenuous efforts for the improvement of their former slaves. Already the whites bear the expense of educating the blacks. In the last six years the expenditure in Virginia for "colored schools" has amounted to near $1,668,000, and it would be safe to say that one and a half millions of this sum were paid by white citizens. So also we take care of their blind, and deaf, and dumb, and idiotic, pay for the trial and safe-keeping of their criminals, and bear the burdens of government. Impartial justice should be administered without reference to race, color, or previous condition; freedom and the right to hold and inherit property should be guaranteed; protection against all violence or wrong should be afforded; but there should be formed no party nor other affiliations which may tend to efface the line of social separation, or ignore the predestined distinction of color. The attempt in Africa to Europeanize the negro and ignore his idiosyncrasies as a race has utterly failed. The races here should be kept from abnormal admixture. Rigid laws, springing from and enforced by an inflexible public opinion, should prevent intermarriage. Miscegenation will degrade the Caucasian. Red and white deteriorate, a fortiori, white and black. The fusion would lower the white race in the scale of civilization, of moral and mental power, and would reproduce the ignorance, superstition, priestcraft, and chronic revolutions of Mexico with her mongrel population.